If you were a bookish teenager in the late 1990s, the odds are good that “Lives of the Monster Dogs,” Kirsten Bakis’s first novel, arrived in your life like a spirit visitation. I remember it staring out at me from the fiction shelves at a Seattle bookstore, not long after it was published in 1997, cover-forward among a thicket of variegated spines. And what a cover it was, a faded photograph of a dignified malamute standing, presumably, on his hind legs, his body sheathed in an antiquated silk smoking jacket, cravat at the collar, one paw — or was it a hand? — balanced rakishly on a cane. Staring into his eyes, you couldn’t not pick it up; picking it up, you couldn’t not read it; reading it, you never forgot it.
Her debut was unforgettable — 27 years later, she’s finally back
With ‘Lives of the Monster Dogs,’ Kirsten Bakis beguiled readers. To write her second novel, she had to find her voice again.
By Jacob Brogan
February 16, 2024 at 11:01 a.m. EST